Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  It was following this article—and a painstaking check-out of Jean’s background through our sponsor’s organisation—that I contacted her.

  “Five thousand dollars for hearing me out—then saying nothing whatever about this conversation, which, believe me, you could never prove took place—”

  “It would seem exactly like the sort of thing that I’d make up?” She smiled devastatingly. Jean was beautiful, with glossy brown eyes, short auburn hair cut in a pageboy style, and a perfect creamy skin. Her nose was Grecian, her chin firm, and her figure was as trim as it had been before her terrible child was born and reared. Her body had never despaired, as other women’s bodies might have done; the sad thing was that, coiled up in each cell in it, was the genetic government—temporarily in exile—that had swept back to power in that child. Jean herself was a sort of sport of Nature: a once-only Romeo and Juliet tossed off by the genetic monkey typists, who tapped out dump pulp ‘novels’ the rest of the time.

  “Exactly. May I call you Jean? Please call me Frank.”

  “Which isn’t your real name?”

  “Actually, it is. So, five thousand for listening to me. And one million dollars clear, banked in Zurich in your name, if you’ll go through with what I propose—whether it succeeds or not.”

  “How can a girl refuse?”

  I put a packet of money on the table. She riffled through the big bills without bothering to count them.

  “We’d like you to take part in a DNA experiment, Jean—an illegal one, but one that I’m sure from your writings that you’ll approve.”

  “Illegal? The genes are the real law—and look what their law has done to me.” She lit a cigarette, then hesitated.

  “We aren’t worried about you breaking chromosomes,” I reassured her. “We’re way beyond that kind of small change. No, I was referring to illegal in the public sense. The prohibition on human experimentation.”

  “You want an egg? Permission granted!” She exhaled smoke. “No, that’s ridiculous. It would be the most expensive egg in the world; and surely you’ve got some women on your team. … So you want me to play host mother, do you? No, that’s silly too. You could easily hire some poor cow for a lot less than that. What is it?”

  “Just this. Our sponsor is a rich man—very rich. Obviously I’m not going to tell you his name. He would like to be a superman, Homo superior, in his own lifetime—and to sire supermen. And superwomen. The next race. He wants to be the first, the founder, the Adam.”

  “And I’m to be …?”

  “In this case, Eve will be created first. We don’t quite know whether we can do it with a human being, though it has worked with rats and monkeys. The monkey subjects are, well, supermonkeys now. But a supermonkey isn’t the same as an ‘almost man’. They belong to a different niche of existence. There isn’t a simple ladder with monkeys down there and us up here.”

  “And the rats—”

  “We’ve had to destroy the rats. If they escaped into the wild, well …” I left the outcome undefined, but Jean could guess it.

  “Not,” I hastened to add, “that we intend to destroy the supermonkeys. That would be … unfair. Our sponsor is most scrupulous.” Nor destroy you either, Jean … But that was better left unsaid.

  “So he has set up a million-dollar trust fund for them too?”

  “They have delightful conditions. We have sterilised their offspring, though. As a precaution.”

  “Yech,” said Jean. But she accepted it. “How is this miracle accomplished?”

  “It depends on the preadaptation of many gene sites for a sort of quantum jump to a new order of being. The old notion of evolution as something slow has gone out the window. Change happens rapidly—like a seed crystal suddenly altering the whole consistency of a saturated solution. Of course, it might be a million years before it does happen. But when it does, it happens fast. The new being is waiting in us like the butterfly in the chrysalis. This isn’t any ordinary tinkering with a few genes, and recombination. It’s a question of nudging the whole works. We’ve developed a self-replicating virus which will attach to the DNA and spread through all the cells in the whole body, optimising the genetic potential and the very body and brain—the whole protein and nerve package—of the infected party. The flesh itself changes, not just the seed. But our sponsor wants to see this new being—Eve—before he commits himself, as Adam.”

  “So I’ll become Super Eve? And he’ll be my mate, once he takes the plunge?”

  “That’s about it. It’ll certainly alter you. It altered the rats and the monkeys—but there was less potential for change there. We believe the human potential is enormous.”

  Jean giggled. “Maybe I’ll be able to fly by will power? Maybe I’ll become Wonder Woman? Or a telepath?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I’d hardly need a million dollars then. Though,” she added hastily, “it’ll be handy to have them.”

  “The money’s more by way of reassurance, in case it doesn’t work. Obviously, if it does, you’ll be our sponsor’s only peer on Earth.”

  “In case? Were there any mishaps with the monkeys?”

  “None,” I assured her.

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Take your time, Jean. Take a week. Two weeks.”

  “Hell, I’ve thought already. The answer’s yes. I’d like to see your monkey farm, though.”

  “Be our guest.”

  The visit to the farm (to use Jean’s word) went well. She scanned all the videotapes of the superrats, and met the supermonkeys, conversing with them through a sign language interpreter. She was most impressed. She preened herself. Nature had played the devil’s own trick on her, but now Nature would get its rightful comeuppance. Not that Nature wasn’t preparing for better things—but in her own bad time.

  And Jean Sandwich dropped out of sight of the world—inasmuch as the world cared whether she was in sight or not.

  The day came to inject the virus into her. It should take a day to establish itself, and a further week to replicate itself through her body, and a week more to express itself in a new Jean, Super Eve. This latter would be a painful week, as her very body reabsorbed itself and generated new issue. However, she would spend all that time under full sedation, to be awakened when it seemed that the process had run its full course. Our sponsor would be watching all this very closely over a closed-circuit link.

  We injected—feeling that the syringe was rather like God’s finger up on the Sistine Chapel roof. Then we settled ourselves, to await developments.

  The transformation of Jean into Jean-Eve, Homo superior, began—imperceptibly at first—eight days after the injection.

  Sedated now, and connected to a spaghetti tangle of catheters and intravenous drips and vital sign monitors, she lay naked in the glassed, sterile room upon a white waterbed that should conform to any bodily alterations—not that any really drastic ones were expected. She wasn’t, for example, very likely to sprout wings.

  The waterbed looked like a great slab of white bread. Jean lay on it, sandwiched between the past of the human race—and the future. However, the future was as yet invisible: she was an open sandwich.

  Gradually, day by day, the alterations became more obvious.

  Her face grew plumper, with an expression that was a weird blend of cunning and vacuity. We hoped this was just the effect of the sedative and a certain retensioning of facial muscles. She put on fat all over, draining our intravenous drips dry time and again. Her chin was engulfed, doubled. Her neat breasts swelled. Her creamy skin grew ruddy, as though she had been exposed to a cold wind for weeks; but also her body temperature was quite high—perhaps this was just the fever of the change in her. Her pageboy hair fell out, and grew back again at amazing speed, thick and black and greasy, as though her scalp had become a spinning loom. Her skeletal structure enlarged; she became not merely fat, but more massive.

  We watched, bemused, wondering how our sponsor was reacting t
o this metamorphosis. I suppose you could say that the figure developing on the waterbed possessed a kind of coarse Rubens magnificence … however, she was hardly a svelte beauty queen by our standards. Still, the sponsor did not complain; he kept his musings to himself. One thing already was for sure: this was not Jean’s mother, reborn in her own flesh—nor was it anything like her daughter extrapolated into adult shape.

  By the tenth day of the metamorphosis, which was taking quite a bit longer than the monkey metamorphoses—as I suppose we should have expected—much of Jean’s new fat had compacted into well-buffered muscle, and she was a prima donna Wagnerian Valkyrie with a huge bust and great limbs. She had become a giantess two metres tall and proportionately girthed, weighing almost two hundred kilos. The Rubens-like impression had given place to something out of heroic legend: one of the giants who predated the Gods on Earth, the first type of being to emerge from the icy void—a troll woman, who could have taken Thor’s hammer from him with one hand.

  By the thirteenth day she was two and a quarter metres long (or tall) and massed well over two hundred kilos.

  Was this to be the future of the human race: a race of giants? Myth had been turned inside-out in the past few days! But was this giantess clever, or was she dumb? Had all the energy she had soaked up been poured into mere bone and body tissue? What had happened to Jean’s mind?

  By the fourteenth day the changes seemed to have stopped. We eased off the sedatives, disconnected her from the drips and catheters, and on the next day early in the morning she awoke.

  She arose suddenly, her mighty muscles rippling, a female Samson or Goliath with thongs of oily hair whipping her shoulders.

  Stepping off the waterbed, she gazed at herself in a long mirror. And laughed boomingly, slapping her palms against her thighs in a way reminiscent of the display of a gorilla.

  The two doctors who were in the room with her inquired, quailingly, how she felt. Beside her they seemed like a pair of thin, shaved monkeys in white coats.

  She grinned hugely. “I feel like a million dollars. And I feel like swallowing my daughter for breakfast. Or perhaps a roast ox. Feed me!” she ordered. She glanced round the aseptic room as though it were really some cave littered with carcases and bones. She strode from the room, through to where we were, tossing the two steel doors open jarringly, and thumped herself on to a steel table, after dismissing the available chairs as too miniature.

  Hesitantly, I held out the largest smock I could find. She accepted it ironically and pulled it over her head, the better to demonstrate its inadequacy. The garment parted at the seams. She blew her nose boisterously on the torn fabric, balled it up and tossed it aside.

  “I shall wear robes,” she announced. “Something long and strong and bright, with a leather belt, and thong sandals.”

  “It’ll take a while.”

  She waved my apologies aside with a great hand. The draught was terrific.

  I gave instructions by telephone, then asked her cautiously: “You are still … Jean?”

  “I have eaten Jean,” said the giantess. “Jean is too mean a name for me. She was just hors d’oeuvres. Everyone is just that. But I’m the main course. I shall call myself … well, I shall decide that after breakfast.”

  Presently, sitting vastly naked on the steel table, Jean-that-was demolished five steaks in a row and a dozen fried eggs. I was beginning to wonder—as I’m sure we all were—where exactly to draw the line between exuberance and incipient madness.

  After her megabreakfast, she belched appreciatively.

  “This room’s too small,” she remarked. “All your rooms are puny. I need great halls.” She focused on the camera, by which our distant sponsor was watching. She waved to it. “Hi. When are the next Olympic Games?”

  Our hearts were in our shoes by now. Surely the sponsor couldn’t contemplate … congress, with this titan? And he certainly wasn’t a sports promoter, even if Jean-that-was did now seem like the ultimate East European athlete, pumped up with anabolic steroids. On the other hand, maybe she was on to something—if she was as fleet as she was mighty. But that wasn’t the point, damn it! The point was what a future superbeing would be like. If they were all going to be like this, we’d eat ourselves into extinction. Come to think of it, perhaps that was what had really gone wrong with the dinosaurs; they had dined too sumptuously. They had cleaned the board. Left nothing for the next meal.

  “I know! I shall call myself Geneva. That’s Jean, plus Eva—from Eve. And all my money’s in Zurich.” She laughed, deafening us.

  At which point the orange telephone burbled—the hot line to the sponsor. It fell to me to pick it up.

  “Frank Caldero speaking.”

  “This is …” Who else? I had heard his voice half a dozen times before. It was a twangy, singsong voice, of a man of about forty, but I could never be sure whether it was lyrically contented or about to become enraged. Particularly at this moment I detected no clue in the tone.

  “She isn’t what I expected, exactly. But of course, none of us knew what to expect, did we? I am … shocked—and pleased too. Such strength and presence pleases me, Frank. I can hardly feel amorously attracted to her, but of course I am viewing her with the eyes of now, not the eyes of someone transformed. Could a prehuman possibly feel excited by an example of Homo sapiens? Hardly! I do recognise this, Frank. Perhaps you thought that I expected a Primavera or an Aphrodite? Rather than a Titan? Not necessarily. You have done remarkable work, all of you. At the moment I cannot like her, or admire her—though there is admiration in my soul for the prodigy she has become. I’m coming down in person, Frank. Anyone in the world can be ordinarily handsome and clever and strong—but we seek the extraordinary, don’t we? I certainly do. I want security precautions redoubled, Frank. I’ll need a few days to arrange things. I don’t think I’m going to be very interested in my old life-style in a few weeks’ time. I too will be a prodigy. We shall be the first of a new race.”

  “What about Jean—I mean, Geneva?”

  “Request her to remain there, till we can meet … on equal terms.”

  I cradled the phone and told the team. We all breathed out and clapped each other on the back. Fortunately, Geneva refrained from joining us.

  “I’d forgotten about him,” she said, with a peculiar expression on her face.

  “It’s part of the deal,” I reminded her cautiously.

  “Ho, ho,” she said. “He’ll need to be superb, to bowl me over.”

  I couldn’t visualise the sponsor, or anyone, bowling her over and taking her; and personally I would want to have a few inches of steel between me and that tryst of the Titans. There was little point in harping on her obligations, though.

  “Point taken,” I agreed. “He’ll need to be.”

  We could always shoot a hypodermic dart into her—something suitable for stunning rhino, say—and do the job with an A.I. syringe. But somehow I didn’t think that was what the sponsor had in mind; he had sounded intoxicated by the coming wedding of the giants.

  Geneva spent the next couple of weeks, duly robed and thong-sandalled, sprinting about the extensive grounds of the farm, splashing through lakes, scaling hills, crashing through thickets. Her amazing new body seemed quite tireless. She made no attempt on our high-walled, electrified frontiers. Why should she? She wasn’t particularly a prisoner, and if she took it into her head to burst out, barrelling straight through the main gate, where would she find a plentiful enough supply of steaks and such in the rural vicinity? Raw, on the hoof? The idea of roaming the countryside like some kind of Grecian-attired Bigfoot no doubt had little appeal.

  Meanwhile, in a well-curtained, black-glassed limousine, our sponsor arrived and was whisked down to the Transformation Room.

  He was a wiry—or weedy—specimen of a man, depending upon one’s point of view, and I couldn’t help thinking of those advertisements for Charles Atlas body-building courses, where the runt has sand kicked in his face by the tough guy. Obvious
ly our sponsor had developed his financial muscles to the bursting point, but when it came to making his body superhuman only science was going to help, not workouts.

  He was injected, and later sedated to lie on Geneva’s waterbed while his two bodyguards stood watch with us, turn by turn, in the observation room.

  Presently, while Geneva thrashed around the estate, enjoying herself, the changes began.

  He went through what I now thought of as the stage of banal caricature—just as Geneva had looked for a while: merely fat, stupid, and sly.

  However, during this period he actually shrank, becoming more like an Egyptian mummy, shrivelled and dried up, as though not only were the catheters draining fluid from his body but so were the feeding tubes. It was as though he were regressing to some wizened monkey thing. We watched this with considerable concern—especially the bodyguards, who were seeing the body they were paid to guard evaporate before their very eyes.

  But then he stabilised. He did not build back, though. Instead—weighing by now less than fifteen kilos, and just over a metre long from head to foot—he became ineffably beautiful: a sprite, something elfin, fairylike, angelic. We were consumed with wonder and anxiety.

  “I don’t think we got it right,” murmured Axel Norman to me, out of hearing of the bodyguards. “This can’t be the future of the human race: giant ladies and tiny males. It wouldn’t work with our species. We aren’t spiders! What’s happening, Frank, I do believe, is a strange psychobiological change: it’s what the subject really wants to become, deep down in his soul. It’s how he really feels he is: the idealisation of himself. Himself as metaphor, rather than meat. A dream person.”

  “There’s plenty of meat on Geneva,” I pointed out.

  “So that was her secret dream. To be an Amazon—it was her soul’s dream, unknown even to her.”

  “And his dream was to be a fairy?”

  “His soul’s dream was that. He wanted to be utterly beautiful—and damn it, he is, but it isn’t by any ordinary human standard of good looks. It’s the beauty of a hummingbird or a butterfly. I bet that if you took the drug, you wouldn’t turn out anything like either of them. You might be a werewolf or … oh, I don’t know what. Breathe water, maybe.”